'Like Russian Dolls’: Postcolonial Identity and Female Genealogies in Zadie Smith’s ”White Teeth”

Abstract

In this paper I am going to focus on a genealogy of Caribbean and British-Caribbean women which is represented in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000), and their relationship with white middle-class English men in Jamaica and subsequently in England after the second generation’s emigration. These black working class women have traditionally occupied the subjugated position in the discriminating binaries on which the racist, sexist and class colonial discourse have been based for so long. It is my aim in this paper to analyse how white male colonialism influences four generations of Caribbean women in White Teeth and how being a woman and being black was a burden in the past and is still a burden in modern Britain, since these women’s colonial history exerts a strong pressure upon them. This can be observed even in the British-born fourth generation, of which Irie, the daughter of a Jamaican mother and an English father - like Zadie Smith herself, is its major representative.